Mind your IQ

Recently three reports were issued dealing with shortcomings in the intelligence process 8212; the US Senate Intelligence Committee Report ...

Recently three reports were issued dealing with shortcomings in the intelligence process 8212; the US Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Iraq, the Butler Committee Report in the UK and the 9/11 Commission Report in the US. Though the reports dealt with different subjects they all focussed on one common conclusion 8212; that intelligence assessment should be independent and autonomous and free of influence of the executive branch. The Senate Report was devastatingly critical of the CIA assessment on Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Though issued as a bipartisan report, the Democrats have implied that the CIA8217;s assessment was influenced by pronouncements of political personalities and media hype. The Butler Committee has been critical of the way the assessment of the British Joint Intelligence Committee was used in the issue of the dossier on Iraqi WMDs in Parliament and to the public by omitting all the caveats in the assessment. The 9/11 Commission is of the view that the CIA director cannot do justice to three jobs at the same time. He cannot run the external intelligence agency, be in charge of intelligence assessment and also be intelligence adviser to the president. It therefore proposes the creation of the post of National Intelligence Director who will foresee the coordination of different intelligence agencies and also national intelligence centres which will be assessment bodies for different subjects.

The intelligence process comprises of collection, compilation, analysis and assessment. What reaches the national leadership is assessed intelligence which should lead to policy-making. A wrong assessment on Iraq having WMDs led to an uncalled for war on Iraq. As a senior senator pointed out, if the Senate had not been given such an assessment they would not have voted for war. Similarly, though the assessment of the British Joint Intelligence Committee had a number of caveats the dossier presented to Parliament created an impression of certainty not warranted by the assessment.

As the 9/11 Commission points out, there was uncertainty among top officials as to whether the Al-Qaeda activity was just a new and especially venomous version of ordinary terrorist threats the US had lived with for decades or whether it was indeed radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet experienced. In the absence of clarity of assessment, terrorism was not an overriding national security concern for the administration before 9/11.

If we are to draw an analogy in the Indian context we have to go back to 1962 and 1965. Contrary to popular view there was no failure in intelligence reporting. The failure was in intelligence assessment. I am in a position to assert this since I was asked to go into the question at that time. There was a stream of reports from the Intelligence Bureau about Chinese activity in Tibet. But individual reports which said so many Chinese soldiers with such and such equipment were seen moving south, east or west on such and such day at a specific time did not make any sense to the recipient of the intelligence reports. If they were plotted on a map and then assessed, a clear picture of Chinese build-up against certain points on our border emerged. Since the Joint Intelligence Committee of that time did not meet and did not carry out regular assessments, a myth was created that there was an intelligence failure. The truth was there was an assessment failure.

Similarly, in 1965 the Intelligence Bureau reported that Pakistan had raised a second armoured division. The army refused to accept the existence of the second Pakistani armoured division. Again the matter should have been subjected to assessment. Though the JIC was functioning this time, the issue was not subjected to rigorous assessment. The result was the surprise of our armed brigade having to face the Pakistani armoured division at Asal Uttar near Khem Karan.

In this country politicians and senior officials do not give adequate weight to assessment. In the light of the experience of 1962 and 1965 the JIC was upgraded and transferred from Chiefs of Staff Committee to the Cabinet Secretariat. In 1985 it was further upgraded with the chairman being made a secretary to the government. But the work of the JIC is considered so routine that the office has been converted into the secretariat of the National Security Council. The various shortcomings in assessment in the US mentioned in the 9/11 report 8212; turf rivalry among different agencies, lack of adequate communication among them and withholding of information, especially by agencies of the armed forces 8212; exist in our system too. To that extent the lessons derived by the 9/11 Commission in respect of the US are applicable for India too.

In the US the neoconservatives imposed their views on the assessment process in respect of Iraq. Since the CIA had built up the jihadis in Afghanistan in the 8217;80s they, according to the 9/11 Commission, did not have sufficient imagination to conclude that those jihadis who were conditioned by the CIA to declare jihad against the Soviet Union were now waging jihad against the US. These are instances when well-informed and expert collegiate thinking is overridden by 8220;group think8221; conditioned over a period of time.

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In India our politicians and senior bureaucrats assert their own adhocist views in preference to collegiate assessments. Since this has become part of our political and bureaucratic culture there are no attempts to build expertise on intelligence assessment. The result may be seen in assertions by some politicians and retired bureaucrats who sing praises of Panchsheel, totally ignoring China arming Pakistan with nuclear weapons and missiles.

Attempts to make policy without a proper intelligence assessment of the external environment can never be successful. Ultimately the purpose of policy-making is to achieve one8217;s objective against both domestic and external impediments to our progress. Usually only proper assessment will reveal the impediments. Ideologues are averse to assessment as they lack the flexibility and resilience needed to adjust to changing dynamics in external situations. That may explain why the neoconservatives failed in the US and in India too there is a lot of resistance to realistic assessments from our ideologues both from the left and the right.